travel article 1997 / travels 1991
IN BANGLADESH, Mother Earth fluctuates fast between friend and foe: the mighty rivers that flow from the Himalayas give life, while seasonal storms reap death.
What happens in faraway lands is usually irrelevant when watched on telly in New Zealand. However with recent storms in Bangladesh and New Zealand, such headlines jolted me back to when I was caught in one of Bangladesh’s worse-ever cyclones.
While the world witnessed it on T.V: I’d watched from a window within its path.
Bangladesh is roughly half the size of New Zealand but home to 117 million people, making it the world’s most-densely populated country, with 813 people per sq km! Located between India, Burma and the Bay of Bengal – where monsoonal winds whip in from the west, often devastating the southern coast of Bangladesh.
Most of the country is flat, with the crowded deltaic lowlands supporting much of the population. Here the great rivers of the Ganga, the Brahmaputra and the Meghna flood to replenish the intensively-cropped land. From the Ganga River alone, over 1.4 billion tonnes of silt is washed down from the Himalayas each year – nearly fives times that of the Amazon. Upon these low-laying deltas and islands of fertile mud, farming (and fishing) communities thrive, but it is these areas that are most prone to cyclones.
The rivers and their many tributaries are the main mode of transportation in Bangladesh and so in the city of Khulna, I boarded a battered colonial steamboat to Dacca, capital of Bangladesh.
The journey took 28 hours.
Amongst the masses on the upper deck was like a street scene from Calcutta. People filled every space: babies crying, women cooking, goats bleating, hawkers shouting, Muslim males praying as others slept, as the engine droned endlessly. It proved impossible to sit anywhere, until an old man offered me some space on his cardboard – it kept our butts off the damp, rusting deck.
Beside us an elderly Muslim couple shaded from the sun beneath a sheet, tied between the railing and a wall peg. The woman was asleep, slouched against her husband, shrouded by black cloth and veil, only her henna-laced hands exposed to the outsider’s eyes.
It is the Muslim dominance of Bangladesh – at 86% of the population, that saw the country’s creation. Following the Partition of Hindu-dominated India in 1947, East Bengal (as Bangladesh was once called) united with Muslim Pakistan to become East Pakistan. But tensions between dominant West Pakistan and Bengali East Pakistan later ignited into unrest and war in 1970. Supported by India, East Pakistan soon gained independence to become Bangladesh.
Since then military regimes have dominated government, until 1991, when democracy arrived with the change from a Presidential to a Parliamentary system, ushering in Bangladesh’s first female Prime Minster, Begum Khaleda. (Sheikh Hasina, another woman, leads Muslim Bangladesh today.)
COX’S BAZAAR began as a colonial town on the east coast of Bangladesh, founded in 1798 by Lieutenant Hiram Cox of the British East India Company. In recent times it has become a quiet holiday town, noted for the world’s longest sandy beach – stretching 120 kilometres to the Burmese border. I had reckoned on some laziness in the sun, but it wasn’t meant to be …
On the day of my arrival, April 29th 1991, it began to rain. During the evening it sharpened to a Wellington Southerly -torrents of rain and gale-force winds. Gusts shook the old hotel, rattling windows. Outside, palm trees buckled and flapped. Roofing iron clattered, bits crashing, things cracking. Along the corridor windows broke as roaring wind accelerated like a Jumbo jet. The windows in my room ripped free – shattering glass; wooden frames bashing, curtains sucked out, as wind and rain and leaves flew inside. Wave after wave of shrieking winds, that lasted 3 or 4 hours, reaching its zenith about midnight.
Next morning I woke confused, surrounded by water and leaves – the windows broken, the concrete floor like an autumn swimming pool. This was no dream. The wreckage beyond my room was immense.
A gentle breeze caressed Cox’s Bazaar as I wandered damaged streets, where bloated cows lay stiff, where children looked frightened. Banana plantations were shredded. Palm trees torn loose or bent like spiked umbrellas. Buildings had walls ruined, iron roofing scattered. A shed that was a shop sat on its side; thrown down a riverbank.
On the edge of town whole settlements had been washed away by huge tidal surges. Boys waded chest-deep through swamped areas, clutching salvaged bamboo beams. The pristine beach was littered with debris; scores of fishing trawlers sat wedged amid homes; dense rows of mature pines were snapped like matchsticks. Two women wept as they searched the sand, their fingers mining where their home had been. They found a pot.
Days later there was still no electricity, no running water in the hotel. I washed from well-drawn water, and drunk the same mucky brown stuff – aided by purifying tablets. Meantime the locals began repairs; the clang of hammers across the tranquillity.
I now realised the enormity of the storm having read a Bengali English-language newspaper: “Wind speeds averaging 120 km per hour and peaking at 250 km per hour; 139,000 dead; 1.7 million made homeless.”
The pressure of Bangladesh’s increasing population and the resilience of the human spirit ensures people return to rebuild and take their chances in this, a hazardous yet fertile land, where cyclones and rivers shape the rhythms of life.
